Repeal It!

I’ve written elsewhere that we should wait at least a week or two before paying attention to polls on Obamacare, but this one is too remarkable to pass up: Rasmussen finds that 55 percent of voters want Obamacare repealed.
That is extraordinary. Has the public ever greeted passage of a major piece of legislation with this much disgust? I can’t imagine that it has. And so far, at least, there is no sign that mere passage of the bill will cause voters to look more favorably on it.
It occurs to me that there is precedent for this sort of widespread negative reaction, not to legislation, but to Supreme Court decisions. The Supreme Court has on occasion issued liberal edicts that have been widely denounced and have been viewed unfavorably by substantial majorities of the population. This doesn’t normally happen with legislation, for obvious reasons. But in the case of Obamacare, a great many voters view the legislation as an edict handed down from on high in defiance of the will of the majority; a law that is illegitimate because of the extreme partisanship and legislative trickery that enabled its passage. It thus engenders public outrage much like certain Supreme Court decisions that have been seen as undemocratic edicts imposed by out-of-touch elites.
If that analogy is right, the public’s outrage is likely to persist for a long time.